You know that
you’re in deep, deep trouble in a film when you have a lingering
close-up shot of star Keanu Reeves munching on a muffin that literally
appears to go on for minutes, contributing very little, if anything, to
the overall plot.

I’d like to
have breakfast, lunch, dinner…hell…or even just coffee…with Mr. Reeves to talk to
him as to why he thought that appearing in GENERATION UM was in any way
shape or form a good idea on his – on anyone else’s – part.The Mark Mann written and directed indie drama – which attempts,
I think, to show a portrait of the daily lives of three downtrodden
characters eking out a pathetic existence in the Big Apple – is one of the
most amateurishly conceived, shot and acted films that I’ve seen in many
a moon.

There is nothing
inherently wrong, per se, with a film that tries to distil the depressing
existence of its lonely and trouble souls.Some of the best films that I’ve ever seen have been sad.Yet, GENERATION UM is more of a depressingly painful endurance test
than it is an invigorating and emotionally charged expose of its
flawed personalities.Ultimately,
it’s a maliciously aimless film about aimless, dislikeable losers that
– through the course of the film’s agonizingly long 97-minutes – you
never once have a modicum of interest in.

Worst yet, the
film is almost nightmarishly unendurable for its portrayal of the
Seinfeld-ian levels of nothingness that permeates its characters’ lives.We are introduced to John (Reeves), who works as a driver for an
escort service and, at the beginning of the film, is driving home two of
his inebriated workers - Violet (Bojana Novakovic) and Mia (Adelaide
Clemens) - home to their ramshackle Lower East Side apartment.While they detox, John decides to meanderingly partake in a long
jaunt through his local New York surroundings.He does so after he can no longer stomach being in his dilapidated
bachelor pad, let alone in the company of his obnoxious and overbearing cousin (Jonny Orsini),
who seems to be utterly clueless to John’s spiraling-out-of-control
depression.

Viewers in the
audience watching this film, within just its first 30 minutes or so, will
wish that they could just check out of it and not be subjected to
John’s - and the other character’s – emotional woes.The jittery camera follows John’s gloomy, melancholic state, as
he rides subways, looks into store windows, munches on breakfast pastries,
and so on.The only time this
stillborn film generates any semblance of a dramatic heartbeat is when
John, without much explanation, decides to steal a digital camera from a
spectator filming – ahem! – a hula-hooping competition for people
dressed liked cowboys.He
then begins to shoot anything that pleases him – like squirrels in
trees, for instance – until he decides to return to his two female
friends, turn the camera on them, and allow them to reveal their deepest
and most intimate internal thoughts.By this point in the film, I wanted to turn and point a gun to my
head.

There are so few
films out there that are as positively soul-crushing and sucking as
GENERATION UM.Here is a film
that wants and expects us to pay attention and yearn to be in the company
of these scumbags for an hour and a half and take interest in what they
are doing and what they have to say.There is no one to even remotely like or even modestly
relate to in the film.John
himself is so ill defined, so monosyllabic, and so ultimately gruff that
you kind of have to smack yourself upside the head to be reminded that you’re supposed to give a damn about him.His two female friends – impenetrably sullen as they are – do
not fare much better.Calling
them “friends” is almost a disturbing misnomer.Violet, for instance, parades around the film in a perpetual
alcoholic and drug induced haze so much that she becomes, within five minutes of
her being of screen, one of the most easily loathsome and irksome screen
characters in many a moon.The
attention-hungry woman, in one truly vile scene, literally forces herself
sexually on John in a bathroom stall.When she’s finished performing oral sex on him she arrogantly
belches.Sigh.

The only thing
that could have possibly saved this useless and wasteful exercise in
filmmaking would have been its third act, where John – while filming –
asks Violet and Mia to voyeuristically make painful confessions to him,
but the resulting testimonials from them all provides absolutely nothing
in terms of embellishing or at least commenting on their degrading
freefall into angst and misery.After
attempting to elicit big, revealing declarations for these women to his
would-be inquisitive camera, John then drives them to their next gig,
which involves what appears to be a bachelor party at a lavish hotel,
where the women have to further debase themselves by participating in an
orgy.

GENERATION
UM is the kind of film that makes you want to rush home, jump into the
shower, and wash its grimy stench right off of you.I think that there is certainly an involving and intimately
rendered film to be had about chronicling the dispassionate pursuits of
deeply dispassionate people trying to make it on their own two feet in
Manhattan.Alas, the manner with which GENERATION UM takes a haphazardly
casual to the point of complete formlessness stylistic and narrative
approach to its characters becomes more grating and intolerable with each
one of its befuddling minutes.To be fair, Reeves might be pitch-perfectly cast to play a
methodically mumblecore character like John (the role requires him to
stare stoically, grunt a few lines here and there, and appear in an
existentialist stupor through most of the film).Yet, not even the participation of a big-name actor like him could
possibly save this unmitigated failure of a film.There is nothing on screen here that could possibly convince me to
see GENERATION UM ever again or…ummmm…convince me to convince you to
ever see it for a first time.